Close To Home by Jennifer Stuerzl

Jennifer Stuerzl respectfully acknowledges the local aboriginal people who have nurtured and cared for this place, now known as Muswellbrook, since time immemorial. She offers her respects to elders past, present and emerging.

Jennifer Stuerzl is Muswellbrook-born artist, with her family still resident in the region. As a result, Stuerzl’s connections and visits to the Hunter area have been constant, despite her own residence over recent decades in places as diverse as Tasmania and Queensland. She returns regularly, immersing herself in the natural environment and its variances, as is her habit wherever she is.
As an artist her vision is attuned to the natural world, with a change of aesthetic visible across the diversity of the landscapes that she has experienced and documented. Using media including watercolour, acrylic and ink to produce paintings, artist books and prints, she summons the tactile and sensual qualities of particular places, often embedding sediments, feathers and other evidence of the site within the work.

This group of paintings, artists books and prints explores her diverse output. A series of new landscapes include local birds immersed in their environment, completed during an extended visit to Muswellbrook in 2022. These paintings are intimate in both scale and treatment, denoting her familiarity with this place and the affection she has for the wildlife—the white cockatoo with crest elevated as it observes from high up on a branch, the deep blue tones of the kingfisher camouflaged amongst a watery background in the low light of the afternoon, and the penetrating intelligence of the owl who is most active at night.

The environment is also evoked with her materials. She has salvaged mangrove timber as tactile book ends for her artist books, with their diverse shapes–concertina to sculptural—also reflecting their inspiration in their execution. Sewn with linen thread they draw these places close under our gaze, with a gentle and sensory advocacy for this part of the Australian continent. The immersive nature of her work notes the shifts and changes that occur during a day, season and passing years.

Jennifer Stuerzl has a practice-led Master of Philosophy from Queensland College of Art (2014). She has exhibited consistently since 1997, including twenty solo exhibitions, and undertaken artist residencies in Australia and the USA. She has participated in Sydney Contemporary Art Fair every year since 2018, with her work in institutional collections in Australia, USA, UK, New Zealand, Vanuatu, Canada and Japan.

Louise Martin-Chew
Arts Writer

Visit Muswellbrook Library to check out this exhibition and more, our full opening hours can be found here.